ALWAYS PACKING

It doesn’t matter how big the room is. If Dana Gleason is in it, you’ll know it. The guy is a one-man minstrel. If there’s a story to be told, he’ll tell it using perfectly timed table-thumps and calculated F-bombs as his musical accompaniment.

Dana is a legend of the outdoor industry. He’s built four pack-making companies, each based on an uncompromising commitment to innovation and quality. His first two endeavors, Kletterwerks and Mojo Systems, were successful enough to act as a springboard for the launch of Dana Design in 1985, a brand that hewed against the conventional pack designs of the time and was the choice of professional outdoorspeople in-the-know.

Dana Design packs caught the attention of a SEAL team training in Alaska around 1989. After an initial, kinda hilarious consultation he describes below, Gleason’s pack-making talents would benefit our nation’s warrior elite with a relationship that continues to this day through the 20-year-old brand he started with his business partner, Renee Sippel-Baker — Mystery Ranch. Looking at the Big Guy, as he’s known around the shop, and his early résumé, he’s an unlikely hero of the military industrial complex. This son of a florist, junior college drop-out, crag rat, and ski bum created load carriage designs unlike anything else available.

Dana Design and, later, Mystery Ranch packs featured unconventional frame systems and bag patterns that took advantage of newly developed, high-tenacity fabrics to create packs that blended durability, weight, and comfort in a ratio that appealed to military, hunting, wildland fire, and mountaineering pros carrying heavy loads over long distances.

Gleason’s latest chapter sees him edging into retirement as he oversees the designers he now employs at Mystery Ranch in Bozeman, Montana. But his story begins in Westin, Massachusetts, where family trips to the mountains of New Hampshire fostered his love of the outdoors and a penchant for risk-taking